Weekend Box Office — ‘Dune’ Does Its Best To Justify a Sequel Both in the U.S. And Internationally
This was perhaps one of the most-awaited box office results of the entire year, especially once we realized the box office was back on its feet.
As it’s been said multiple times, Dune depends on its box office results to guarantee the adaptation of the second part in the hypothetical Dune: Part II that the cast and crew are eager to make. The movie came into the weekend after having opened in several overseas markets last month and grossing over $120M already. On Friday, the movie debuted in many other markets, including the United States, China and the U.K. Before we move on, make sure to check out our spoiler-free review of the movie right here.
Dune, indeed, topped the domestic and international charts this weekend. In the States, it was followed up by a very big drop from Halloween Kills. Here’s the top 5 in the United States, which we’ll analyze in a moment:
- Dune ($40.1M, NEW RELEASE)
- Halloween Kills ($14.5M, -70.7%)
- No Time to Die ($11.89M, -50%)
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($9.1M, -44.9%)
- Ron’s Gone Wrong (7.3M, NEW RELEASE)
Dune
There are many factors to consider when analyzing Dune‘s $40.1M opening, so let’s start from how it performed versus the predictions. Going into the weekend, Box Office Pro said it’d make this much, but their initial projections from a few weeks ago said it could go as high as $50M. That obviously didn’t happen, but those projections were quite optimistic. This is a release that was 100% affected by the pandemic. Had Dune opened to this much without a pandemic, we would be calling it a financial disaster, the same way we did back in 2017 when Denis Villeneuve’s previous movie, Blade Runner 2049, came out.
However, due to the pandemic, the movie suffered from a hybrid release on HBO Max, where there were probably a lot of people checking it out. There are no numbers coming in from the platform, but we can only hope they are strong enough to justify a sequel. Under normal circumstances, Dune could have easily opened to $70-$85M. Rough estimations by Deadline say this movie could have gone as high as $95M had the HBO Max dual release not happened.
But let’s move on to the bright side, because these numbers are actually rather good — in fact, Dune has set several records with its opening weekend number. For starters, it is officially Warner Bros.’ biggest opening weekend in the U.S. market of the year, and for that matter, since the pandemic began. In fact, it is WB’s biggest opening weekend since Joker, on October 4, 2019. The following graphic compares WB’s movies released in 2021, putting together U.S.’ opening weekends, domestic, and worldwide grosses:
We clearly see that, after one weekend in the U.S. and China, Dune is also Warner Bros.’ second-largest grosser worldwide of the year. Indeed, if we go to the international box office, we see that the movie accumulated $47.7M overseas. Adding all of it up, we arrive at $221M worldwide, which means the studio already made its production budget back. Remember that doesn’t mean it has turned a profit, since marketing costs can go as high as production costs. In fact, according to Deadline, production and distribution costs go as high as $300M, which means that, taking the theaters’ cut into account (around 33%), Dune will have to make $400M to break even on its theatrical run, which seems unlikely at this point. This is where HBO Max will come in handy.
As far as Denis Villeneuve is concerned, this is also the biggest opening for a movie he’s made so far. We see here the same graphic as before, but for Villeneuve movies only this time around (only movies with wide openings, we are excluding Enemy):
One more thing. Dune was originally set to open the first week of October, typically the date that WB sets for their big Oscar contender of the year — Joker, A Star is Born, etc. The movie was pushed back due to strategic reasons, but assuming it had opened there, let’s compare its opening weekend to previous WB movies that opened in that week these past few years:
Week 2 of the release in the U.S. will be rough to estimate. Word-of-mouth is better than for any other movie in WB’s 2021 slate, but the reality is that all of them have had big drops from week 1 to week 2, mainly due to the HBO Max hybrid release. This means that people that want to check out the movie again are more likely to do it at home, despite the cast and crew’s efforts to convince people to see the movie in theaters. That being said, WB is also keeping an eye close on HBO Max numbers, so while repeat views at home will not account for box office dollars, they will also be seen by the studio.
Halloween Kills
This is another big story this weekend, and quite pertinent to what we were discussing. While the movie pulled off an impressive $50M opening weekend despite its hybrid release on Peacock, it seems like repeat viewings in theaters were not in many people’s minds. The movie’s main demographic is a young audience, who is usually checking out the movie as soon as possible, versus older demographics who are more consistent throughout the movie’s theatrical run. This, together with the Peacock release, which also might have appealed to a lot of young people that wanted to check the movie again, caused the movie to drop 70% from last week to this one.
Despite these numbers, however, Halloween Kills has almost made $100M worldwide, and hasn’t even opened in several international markets. The movie is highly profitable for a studio that always opts for very cheap productions, a strategy that has always paid off.
No Time to Die
Going back to the good news, Daniel Craig’s last entry in the Bond franchise, which is also Bond’s 25th movie, has already surpassed $525M worldwide. This is a giant success for a movie that was one of the first to be pushed back from its 2020 spot. At this pace, it could go as high as $700M — this is also where the demographic argument comes in. Bond movies, while also appealing to young people, usually are a meeting point for older demographics, who will check out the movie during its third or fourth week of release.
U.S.’ box office is not as large as it’s been for previous Craig movies, but the international numbers are very strong, and so far they don’t even account for China, where the movie opens next week.
Venom: Let There be Carnage
This week, once again, we are seeing that Venom 2 is following in the footsteps of the 2018 movie during its U.S. box office run. While it started slightly ahead, it is not slightly behind, but it is still pretty much a mirror image of what happened three years ago. This is actually rather impressive, especially considering that worldwide it’s already made $350M. With a production budget of $110M, it is one of the few high-budget movies released since the beginning of the pandemic to break even without the help of a dual release on a streaming platform. The first movie made $850M worldwide.
Sony celebrated the success even ahead of the weekend, by quietly dating two more movies in their Marvel franchise, on June 23 and October 6 of 2023. One of them will, most likely, be Venom 3, but the other project is a mystery at this point, especially since the movie will have to go into production very very soon to meet the June release date. A possibility is that it will be Kraven the Hunter, which is currently slated for January 2023, but could be delayed until June for whatever reason, leaving the January spot open for any other Sony movie, not necessarily Marvel-related. Another possibility is that it is Morbius 2, which could open in October and leave the June spot for Venom 3. The first Morbius has yet to open, something that will theoretically happen next January. More possibilities arise after watching the post-credits scene of Let There be Carnage, but we’ll leave that to the viewers to speculate.
Ron’s Gone Wrong
Not much to comment here, except that this is apparently not a great time for animated movies — that happened a few months ago. The 20th Century Studios release opened to a very disappointing $7.3M. Earlier this year, several animated movies proved to be strong box office holdovers, especially Raya and the Last Dragon, which despite the Premium Access dual release on Disney Plus, managed to stay in the top 5 for over 12 consecutive weeks.
However, between Ron’s Gone Wrong and The Addams Family 2, which will seemingly not be able to crack $100M worldwide (the first movie made $200M), it seems like animated movies are suffering at the moment. We’ll see how Disney’s Encanto faces this challenge when it opens in a month.
The French Dispatch
One last movie to be commented here, as this weekend saw the release of another Timothée Chalamet movie: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, originally set for October 2020, had a limited release this weekend, and it blew up the box office. So much so that it now accounts for the biggest per-theater-average since the pandemic began, making $1.3M on 52 theaters ($25,000 on average). Here is a graphic that compares the ten biggest per-theater-averages since March 2020:
Overall health state of the box office
The last point I’d like to make is the following: the box office has been recovering these past few weeks from the impacts of the virus, which almost killed the entire business. This was the 43rd week of the year, and in the following graphic, we see a comparison of the total box office amount from each week in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021:
Notice that we are not that far behind previous years at this point, and we easily see that had Dune or Halloween Kills not pulled a hybrid release on their respective streaming platforms, we’d be on top of 2018 and 2019. Although we are right now ahead of 2017, that will not be the case next week — that marked the opening of Thor: Ragnarok back in that year. It is possible we will surpass all three of those years when Eternals comes out on November 5.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
